Don't forget the most irritating restriction of all - no circular dependencies between PAS files. That one could get really painful later on in bigger projects.

Don't forget the most irritating restriction of all - no circular dependencies between PAS files. That one could get really painful later on in bigger projects. The Delphi compiler was really great, but it was meant primarily for GUI business apps and not any other kind of coding. Result: the compiler hardly optimised. Borland didn't advertise new Delphi releases by referencing benchmark scores for example, but rather new productivity features. Building fast compiler is not sorcery. Look at Java. JavaC starts out interpreted every time you run it, but it can still compile a large amount of source code very fast. Then at runtime HotSpot C1 can produce machine code from bytecode at a staggering speed. The resulting code even has respectable performance, with the slower (but still fast) C2 compiler only kicking in for where it's really needed.